The modern history of geographical Syria (Bilād al-Shām) has developed into one of the richest and most inspiring fields in Middle Eastern studies. Among the chief reasons for this achievement is the scholarship of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, who has been honoured by the thirty articles of this volume, which represents the most relevant topics in urban, socio-economic and political history of sixteenth–eighteenth-century Syria. Almost all are significant contributions to the field in their own right, but this short review can mention only a few.
Ottoman conquest incorporated Syria into a huge free-trade zone that provided security for foreign traders, considerable growth and a firm commitment to the new provinces, as T. Philipp shows. This situation continued, according to M. al-Mubaidin's contribution, well into the eighteenth century, when European economic influence was still less strong than is commonly assumed. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Ottoman internal trade encountered difficulties, but still remained far more important than trade with Western Europe. Greek Catholic merchants asserted themselves against French competition, as D. Crecelius explains, focusing on sea trade between Egypt and Syria. Due to the region's progressive integration into the world economy, Damietta, Jaffa and Acre experienced economic decline following a period of rapid growth. Examining Sidon, a booming port city during the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, S. Weber elucidates the spatial dimension through maps and reconstruction sketches, and combines archaeological and architectural evidence with archival sources to reveal how investments, by imperial dignitaries as well as local notables, in the whole region were interrelated. However, regional differences were considerable, as several excellent contributions on urban political, social and economic history amply demonstrate.
A. Meier examines the formation and divergent development of three Ottoman–Damascene military households belonging simultaneously to local and/or imperial élites. Her very instructive analysis shows that critical elements of household formation were marriage patterns, control of endowments and property-like tax farms, as well as attaining administrative positions. The changing composition of Damascene military households and the janissaries’ merging with local “civilian” society is traced by C. Establet and J.-P. Pascual based on probate inventories and records of guardianship, which show no significant differences between military and civilian registers in terms of wealth. For the nineteenth century, P. Sluglett calls for studies on Ottoman municipalities, pointing to their importance in the emergence of civil society and the public sphere (this desideratum has been taken up by a group of researchers in Berlin led by Nora Lafi).
B. Heyberger's lucid research survey on Christians in Syria shows how they integrated into society, drawing a varied picture of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire and strongly recommending a complementary study of occidental, local and imperial sources. Western merchants and missionaries, instead of bringing new structures, became part of the local game of alliances and protection, while Catholic Syrians could, on the one hand, assure the Ottoman authorities of their loyalty and on the other complain in Versailles about Muslim oppression. B. Masters follows this thread in the later development of Melkite identity, against Maḥmūd II's centralization policy that supported the Constantinopolitan patriarchs against local autonomy, which increasingly coincided with conversion to Catholicism. Supporters of this tendency countered accusations of defection to the Franks with the claim that they continued to follow their forefathers’ tradition, while the Orthodox were the ones who had broken away. Gradually (and with local Muslim support), they managed to convince the Muslim authorities and eventually to gain full recognition, in 1848, as a separate, proto-national millet. S. Tamari suggests that there may be hints of a proto-national Muslim–Arab continuity linking pre-modern to modern Syria in a seventeenth-century polemic, in which ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī refers to arguments of the eighth–ninth century shuʿūbiyya context and deprecates his Turkish-speaking Qāḍīzādeli opponent who “forgets that not long ago he was probably a Christian”. While the precise meaning of Nābulusī's Arabness within the historical context is not entirely clear, the question of pre-modern collective identities deserves further study, as Salih Özbaran's book on Rūm identity has demonstrated.
The transformation of social structures is examined in several contributions to urban history, and in one of the few rural studies. D. Douwes describes the functioning and change of trans-communal networks, especially of Ismaili and Nuṣayrī groups in the coastal mountains during the late Ottoman and Colonial periods. The trans-communal reverence of saintly shrines had traditionally enabled shaykhly families to serve as mediators and judges, but recognition of the Agha Khan by many Ismailis, and the Nuṣayrī reform movement of Salmān al-Murshid, dissolved these institutions.
A few contributions portray “the Ottomans” as the unchanging and malicious Other. M. Daher recounts the story of the Maʿn family, who, in contrast to “the Ottomans”, are described as harbingers of welfare and modernization. With regard to Tripoli, F. Hoblos argues that Ottoman rule was not “leading society towards progress and prosperity”. Preparing a balance sheet covering more than four centuries, he concludes that the Ottoman administration's sole interest consisted of the extraction of taxes, wondering how the inhabitants were “somehow unaware that they were being colonised, never even discussing it among themselves”. This assessment might need some qualification, as it would be hard to prove that Ottoman rule was more oppressive than contemporary régimes elsewhere, or that the core region would have been privileged in this regard.
The only recurring flaw to catch the eye are transcription errors. A simplified rendering of fairly familiar names makes perfect sense for non-specialist readers, but when it comes to unknown personal names, entire book titles, legal terms or quotation, sometimes advanced knowledge of Arabic or Turkish is necessary to guess the original words. Readers from adjacent fields are not well-served in this way, while modern wordprocessing programs provide all conceivable diacritics. This minor criticism notwithstanding, this impressive collection of excellent studies represents the most important topics in the history of Bilād al-Shām and will hopefully stimulate more, equally sophisticated, research in this central field of Middle Eastern studies.
